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For decades, David Boies has been one of the most renowned and impactful lawyers in America. He represented Al Gore in the legal battles over the 2000 Presidential election, and he was a lead attorney in the case that overturned California’s Proposition 8, which had banned gay marriage in the state. In more recent years, however, Boies has been embroiled in controversy after representing Harvey Weinstein and the fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos (while serving on its board of directors). Boies is still arguing cases, including one last year that led to a four-hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar judgment against Google for unlawful user tracking.

Last week, Boies wrote an op-ed about the war in Iran for the Wall Street Journal. In the piece, Boies, a Democrat, argues passionately in favor of the war, and scolds people—mainly other Democrats—for, in his mind, letting their dislike of President Trump affect their opinion of attacking Iran. As he writes, “If we believe that Iran presents a serious threat, we need to support the president on this issue. There’s plenty to disagree with him about, and we don’t need to like or admire him. But on Iran we should be on common ground.”

I recently spoke by phone with Boies. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

You’re known as one of the most famous lawyers in America. Why did you feel it was important to support the war with Iran in the pages of the Wall Street Journal?

I thought that we were tending to approach the war more in terms of where we stood politically and how we felt about the current Administration than the merits of the conflict. When I was younger, people used to say that politics stopped at the water’s edge. While that was never really true completely, I thought it was an important aspirational goal.

In the piece, you write that what is “particularly troubling for our country, is opposition rooted simply in antipathy toward Mr. Trump himself . . . for most of our history we have given the president the benefit of the doubt.” Can you talk about that?

Sure. When North Korea invaded South Korea, we’d just come out of the Second World War. Everybody was weary of war. Everybody was embracing peace. Nobody wanted to send American soldiers back into battle. And while the war was politically unpopular, and probably cost Truman the opportunity to run for another term in office, both political parties supported that conflict, and they supported Truman necessarily.

This war was started by a President who frequently seems unstable, who can’t lay out a clear reason for the war, and who makes vague threats against our allies. We have a Secretary of War who seems to delight in death and destruction. The White House X feed is putting out fascistic video edits of military attacks that delight in violence. How do you synthesize all that with the point you’re trying to make?

Sure. I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, Do you believe that this war is necessary or not? And I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, first, Do you believe it’s acceptable for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them? If you believe that, then the next question you have to ask yourself is: Could we have achieved that goal of eliminating the threat that Iran poses by some other means?

You were not a fan of the deal President Obama’s Administration made in 2015, I gather?

I was not. And the reason I was not is that I did not trust the Iranian regime. And, if you believe that they are as big a threat to America as they can be, then I believe you have to conclude that you need to prevent them from having nuclear weapons.

President Trump did say that we destroyed their nuclear-enrichment facilities less than a year ago.

Right. And if I believed everything President Trump said I might have voted differently in the last election.

So we shouldn’t trust him saying that he destroyed the Iranian nuclear program a year ago, but it is worth embarking on this larger war that he is leading.

But see—my view is I don’t support him in this conflict because he says it’s the right thing to do. I support him because I think it’s the right thing to do.

It just seems like it’s not clear what he’s doing. His Administration has laid out a number of different reasons for the war. Sometimes it is about nuclear weapons. Sometimes not. And it seems like President Trump could keep this going for a very long time. It also seems like he could pull the plug at any minute and decide that the war is over. So it’s very hard to separate the means from the ends, since we don’t know what the ends are. And the means, in terms of civilian casualties and negative effects on the global economy, seem quite perilous.

Well, I think you have to separate out civilian casualties from the economics. I mean, neither is desirable, obviously, but in terms of the economic impact war always has a terrible economic impact. I think that the economic dislocation of this conflict is probably going to be less than most of the major conflicts that we’ve engaged in. But one of the reasons war is terrible is not only the human casualties but the economic cost. But I don’t believe that that can be a reason not to use military force when you otherwise conclude it is essential for national security.

Right, when you say it’s an existential threat, then I would understand that, but it seems like even the Trump Administration is not clear that they want to make that claim. I mean, sometimes they do, but it’s confusing.

Well, you see, I start from the proposition that Iran cannot afford to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver those weapons to American cities.

I don’t believe they could do so today, because I believe if they could have done so today, rather than hit Abu Dhabi and Oman, they would be hitting New York and Miami. And what we have seen in the last month, in terms of Iran’s response, is that their capacity with ballistic missiles has expanded much more rapidly than I think anybody expected.

Trump declared that we destroyed one hundred per cent of Iran’s “military capability.”

I don’t have the intelligence briefing to know whether that’s true or not. I think that one of the things that concerns me is that he may simply declare victory and stop too soon. And one of the reasons that I wrote the article that I did is that I don’t want political pressure on him to stop before–

We need to give him some runway.

You know, I don’t know how much runway he thinks he has.

That’s what I mean. It seems like it’s important for him to have enough to finish the job.

Yes. That’s my view.

Just thinking this through, you said you’re worried that Trump could stop the war too soon. If, in fact, he does just quit, and America doesn’t accomplish what you want it to accomplish, but there is an economic hit, there are people who’ve died, then that seems like one reason to not support the war.

Well, if you knew that he was going to stop before he finished the job, I think it would be a complicated question, because, while he may not have destroyed everything in Iran at this point, he has certainly set the regime back a long time. And so I think that even if he were to stop now I believe he will have accomplished something, and what I would hope is that people think about this, think about what this means to our country, think about what this means to the future of our country, and they would give him the support that would encourage him to finish the job.

Right, so we should sort of be egging him on. I know that’s a cheap phrase. But we need to make sure he’s got the wind in his sails to keep going.

Exactly. I think that’s fair.

Does it worry you at all that we may find ourselves in the position of egging on an authoritarian figure who is engaged in a war that he started? It just doesn’t quite sit right with me.

One of the things about democracies is that the person that you support doesn’t always get elected, but the person who gets elected is nevertheless your President. And, while I think that part of democracy is opposing things that you disapprove of, part of democracy is supporting our elected officials, regardless of whether they are the same party, regardless of whether you agree with them generally, when they are making decisions that you support. I think that we’ve got to find common ground. We have got to get back to the point where we can support people that we oppose.

I mentioned the White House posting fascistic video edits of strikes on Iran and the things Pete Hegseth says about killing people. Something just feels wrong about egging them on.

I would rather that we had a Department of Defense rather than the Department of War. I believe that this is a conflict that is important to our defense.

There was an American strike that killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, many of them Iranian schoolgirls. The U.S. government denied this for a long time. The President himself is still denying it. It doesn’t take someone supersmart to realize that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth do not care that much about the fact that an American strike killed a bunch of Iranian schoolgirls. I’m curious how you synthesize that with your larger feelings about the war.

Sure. Well, first, nobody can feel comfortable with civilian casualties.

No one outside of the Administration, you mean?

I don’t even think . . . I really don’t think that Donald Trump doesn’t care about civilian casualties.

Sir, you’re a very, very smart guy. You don’t think Donald Trump actually cares about casualties, do you?

Look, I actually do, O.K.? In his first Administration, in 2019, when he turned back the bombers from hitting Iran, I think he did that because I do think he genuinely cares about human life. Now that doesn’t mean that he respects human life the way I would.

It’s a sliding scale.

But, if we bomb that school, and I agree with you that I think the evidence is that we did, I don’t think it serves us well to deny it.

On the other hand, I do understand that in wartime people say a lot of things that are untrue to support their side. We’ve done that repeatedly in every war we fought. Now, with respect to civilian casualties, it is a terrible cost of war, and it is an inevitable cost of war. And, by my count, the civilian casualties that have been incurred are far less than the civilian casualties that this Iranian regime caused in suppressing the protests.

These aren’t in competition with each other, right? They’re both bad independently.

Exactly right.

You said it’s possible that Trump does, in fact, really care about civilian casualties, but he’s not going to say it right now. I hadn’t thought of that.

Think of how many lies our government has told us, not just in Vietnam but in Korea and the Second World War.

I’m also thinking of Pete Hegseth gleefully talking about the Iranian warship that we sunk in the Indian Ocean. It does seem like they’re gleeful about death. And also, just knowing what I know about Donald Trump, it makes me wonder how much these things really hurt him emotionally.

Well, I don’t know. I do know Donald Trump some. I’ve known him for decades. And I think that he would be better served by being willing to recognize some of the costs here, but I believe he respects human life. And I think this is a President who, despite renaming the Department of Defense, really doesn’t like war.

Sure.

War interferes with all the things that he is in favor of.

He might like exerting power.

But I don’t think he wants to exercise that kind of power.

Have you talked to Trump about this war recently?

I have not. I have not spoken to him since he was elected.

After Minneapolis and the way he responded to death there, it’s hard for me to believe he cares too much about human life.

I am not defending the killing of civilians in Minnesota by masked government agents carrying assault weapons.

In the piece, you also wrote that you “deplore” the “fringes of both parties that apparently hate Israel and Jews so much that they oppose any action to neutralize Israel’s enemies.” Should the role of the American military and the American government be to take actions to neutralize Israel’s enemies? There are certainly antisemites in the world, but it seemed weird to complain about Americans not wanting a massive war if one of the reasons was to neutralize Israel’s enemies.

I was not clear. My point was not that we should conduct this war to eliminate antisemitism. My point was that, in terms of the opposition to the war, I could understand people who were opposed to it. But they were so opposed to Israel that anything that happened to dismantle Israel’s enemies was something that they opposed. I do think that Israel is an important ally of the United States. I personally am a supporter of Israel.

You had a controversy with an Israeli intelligence firm, right?

Yeah, right. Exactly. [Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker in 2017 that, while representing Harvey Weinstein, Boies hired Black Cube, an Israeli intelligence firm staffed by former Mossad officers. He instructed the company to spy on Weinstein’s accusers and reporters who were looking into Weinstein’s behavior, including reporters for another client of his, the New York Times.]

I don’t believe this war is being fought to protect Israel. I believe this war is being fought to protect the United States.

Were you at all worried by the reporting that seemed to show President Trump hadn’t really considered or even cared that Iran might block the Strait of Hormuz?

I have not entirely kept up on all the reports, but have they said that the Trump Administration didn’t consider the Iranian government were going to shut the strait?

The military brought it up as a possibility, and Trump waved it off and said it’ll be fine.

I think that if we thought that they were not going to close the strait I believe that was a reflection, had to be a reflection, of not appreciating how far Iran’s military capacity had developed. [The Wall Street Journal reported that after being warned about the war’s risk to global oil prices Trump assured his advisers that the American military could handle it.]

I think you’ve also highlighted in this conversation that there’s a difference between liking President Trump or supporting him or voting for him, and putting your faith in him to execute this operation.

Right. And it’s even different from asking, If we were going to prosecute this war, would I want it prosecuted by Donald Trump or Harry Truman? Or Donald Trump or Lyndon Johnson? I didn’t pick Donald Trump as my President, but he is my President. ♦

Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A familiar face shows up at the door wearing an uncanny smile. You warily let him in. He’s acting mostly like himself, if a little colder, until he sinks his fangs into your neck: Ahhh! You convulse, blood spurting, as you’re transformed into a soulless replica of yourself.

That may sound reminiscent of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” which was nominated for a record-breaking sixteen nominations at Sunday’s Oscars. But it also roughly describes what’s been happening in Hollywood, where one studio after another has been sucked into a conglomerated hive of the undead. (Recall Kevin O’Leary’s unhinged “I’m a vampire” speech near the end of “Marty Supreme,” in which a rapacious capitalist reminds the titular young striver that he has been around forever.) For much of the ninety-eighth Academy Awards, two films ran side by side for the gold: “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” both original movies that became box-office crowd-pleasers, with big, messy ideas about America, race, and the intrusion of the past upon the present. Both pointed to the bright future of Hollywood cinema, and both were put out by Warner Bros., a studio that showered resources on two beloved auteurs and was set up for a win-win night at the Oscars. Whichever movie came out ahead—and both did well—it was going to be a triumph for Warner Bros.

Or was it? For months, a lose-lose situation has engulfed the debt-saddled studio, which has been fought over like a prized ham by two potential buyers, Netflix and Paramount. Which smiling caller to invite in? For a while, Netflix had the edge, signalling the ultimate takeover of legacy Hollywood by the streaming revolution. But then, last month, Paramount staged a hostile comeback and sent its rival packing (not without a handsome termination fee), with the likely result that two of Hollywood’s most storied studios would merge into one. Only Paramount isn’t quite Paramount anymore; it’s the vampirized Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, Hollywood’s acquisitive new boy king and the son of the Trump-aligned billionaire Larry Ellison.

All this was on my mind as I emerged from the Dolby Theatre on Sunday night—having just watched “One Battle” win six Oscars, including Best Picture—and rode the escalator up to the Governors Ball. It was my eighth time at the ceremony, and I saw the familiar sights, including a server passing around Oscar-shaped salmon hors d’œuvres and the engraving stand where newly minted winners get their statuettes personalized. Near the Warner Bros. tables, cameras flashed on Ryan Coogler, the writer and director of “Sinners,” who had won Best Original Screenplay. But the company’s victory lap felt, at times, like an Irish wake: the century-old studio that had dominated the night was about to transform into God knows what.

I asked a guy who had worked on one of Warners’ nominated films what he thought of the whole paradoxical situation. “I’ll be direct,” he said. “It’s fucked.”

I began my Oscars adventure with one of the “Sinners” nominees: Ruth E. Carter, who was up for Best Costume Design. Just after noon, I showed up at her house in Beverly Hills, which was bustling with people. Carter was in her living room, where her two Oscars—for “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”—stood proud on a coffee table. The walls were decorated with Dogon masks that Carter had bought and restored for “Black Panther,” and a paper replica of the coat she’d made for Oprah Winfrey to wear in “Selma.” She showed off her look for the night: a bust with white tribal beads, repurposed from a dress she’d worn to the 2023 after-parties, combined with a black skirt, plus a white satin-silk cape and shimmering platform heels with jewelled snake heads. “The designer of this look is two-time-Oscar-winning, five-time-nominated costume designer Ruth Carter,” she said with a laugh. “I wanted it to look cultural but elegant, formal but ethnic. Don’t use that word—you know what I’m saying.”

“It’s honoring the African diaspora,” an associate chimed in.

“There you go!” Carter said. “It’s Afrofuture.”

Her dining-room table was strewn with shoes and jewelry, and she was still working out the accessories. She tried on a chunky bracelet shaped like a growling leopard and showed it to her friend Ernesto Martinez, the costumer of “Song Sung Blue.” “Too much,” he advised her.

Out on the back deck, Carter posed in front of a white backdrop for her team of videographers and photographers. “I’m so comfortable!” she said. “I mean, it took five nominations to get here.” Her partner, Larry Steele, came down the stairs in a tux, and Carter straightened his bow tie. Steele gathered everyone—fourteen people in all—and they held hands as he led a prayer. “Tonight is all about Ruth E. Carter,” he said. “So we want to say thank you for her grace and her mercy that she has bestowed on each and every one of us. May that saying give her travelling grace to and from the Oscars, and let her know that we love her, we trust her, and we hope everything goes the way she has planned.”

The couple got into a Warner Bros.-issued Suburban. “Larry, do you have my speech?” Carter called out. (It would remain unread; she lost to Kate Hawley, for “Frankenstein.”) Her first film was Spike Lee’s “School Daze,” in 1988, and five years later she got her first Oscar nomination, for Lee’s “Malcolm X.” “Denzel and I were both nominated,” she recalled in the car. “I remember sitting next to Eiko Ishioka, who won for ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ and her mother, who had a traditional Japanese costume on.” She was nominated again in 1998, for Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad.” “There wasn’t a party or anything after for us. So it felt like the loneliest Oscar nomination that I’ve ever gotten.” That year, she wore a red Richard Tyler gown with a padded silk shawl. “It was beautiful. I still have it. That was the year ‘Titanic’ sank all of our boats.”

Carter’s first win came in 2019, for “Black Panther,” her first feature collaboration with Coogler—“I was kind of shot out of a cannon,” she said—and her second arrived four years later, for “Wakanda Forever,” just days after her mother died, at a hundred and one. Her “Sinners” nomination had made her the most nominated Black woman in Oscars history. “I feel like I’m a veteran,” she said. “Sinners” had felt intimate and communal, she said, almost like an indie film compared with the “Black Panther” movies. Awards season had ballooned since the early nineties. “There wasn’t all of this fanfare,” she continued. “We didn’t have panels and talks. I don’t think people asked me much about putting the costumes together for ‘Malcolm X.’ I’m asked more about ‘Malcolm X’ now than I was then.”

The car lurched toward the red carpet, and Carter passed around gum. “No gum on the carpet,” her publicist warned from the back seat. “It’s in writing.” Rounding a corner, we saw an annual staple: religious street protesters with signs that read “TRUST JESUS” and “GOD HATES SIN.” (His position on “Sinners” was yet to be determined.) Bomb-sniffing dogs checked out the car—standard procedure, but this year the Academy had beefed up security after the F.B.I. alerted state officials to unverified bomb threats, purportedly from Iran. “I feel cool, calm, and collected, which is new to this year,” Carter told me. The car door opened, and she emerged. A voice on the loudspeaker announced, “Ruth E. Carter has arrived.”

I split with Carter and her crew on the red carpet and walked through a corridor swathed in gold curtains and lined with fake Japanese maples. A peek behind the regalia and you could see a Sephora and a Ben & Jerry’s, because, oh, right, the Oscars take place at a mall. Near the Glambot—a robotic camera that looks like it escaped from “The Matrix”—I met Michella Rivera-Gravage and Karim Ahmad, a married couple and two of the executive producers of the nominated Tunisian-French film “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” One of its actors, Motaz Malhees, a citizen of Palestine, couldn’t get a visa to attend because of President Trump’s travel restrictions. Where was he watching from? “That’s a good question,” Ahmad said. “I think he’s in the West Bank.”

The collision of the real world and the fantasyland of the Oscars continued when I met Tracii Wesley, the operations and security manager at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and the subject of the nominated documentary short “The Devil Is Busy.” “It’s kind of a day in the life of what happened after Roe v. Wade was overturned,” Wesley said, describing how her workplace is besieged by protesters. “There are a lot of patients that we don’t get to see.” She’d noticed the “GOD HATES SIN” demonstrators on her way in, an eerily familiar presence. “You have to wonder where they’re coming from,” Wesley said. “There’s a judgment that comes with that, and that’s what I deal with when I’m at work. I always say, ‘God loves everybody, right?’ ”

I spun around: there was Jessie Buckley, the soon-to-be Best Actress for her role in “Hamnet,” telling someone how she just wanted to take the moment in; Spike Lee, in a purple fedora; Conan O’Brien, towering above it all. It was eighty-four degrees, and the stars were shvitzy. The Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, sweating in his brown-velvet suit, had just done the Glambot. “I just know that I am damp,” he said. Not far behind us was David Sedaris, who was there as a guest of The New Yorker, which had two nominated shorts in the running, “Retirement Plan” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” (“Saliva” won in a tie, with “The Singers.”) Sedaris, an Oscars first-timer, had a tiny notebook in which he was writing down names of all the famous people he saw, like a birder: Rose Byrne, Sissy Spacek, Joel Edgerton. “I’ve been keeping a list since 1988,” he said. (Seeing them onstage doesn’t count, he clarified.) “I only saw two ICE pins. I thought everyone would have one, but I think the war kind of got in the way of that,” he observed. I told him that Kieran Culkin was right behind him, and he mouthed, “Thank you!” and wrote down “Kieran Culkin.”

After he walked off, I told Culkin he’d wound up in Sedaris’s book. “He knows who the hell I am? ” Culkin said, incredulous. “Fuck, I love him! Point him out to me next time so I can write his name down.”

Leading up to the ceremony, there had been something of a surge for “Sinners,” to the point that some prognosticators were tipping it for an upset Best Picture win over “One Battle After Another.” It certainly felt that way in the room: whenever a “One Battle” nominee was read out, the crowd would applaud respectfully, but then break out into enthused cheering at any mention of “Sinners.” Nonetheless, for the first hour or so, “Sinners” kept losing awards: Best Costume Design (sorry, Ruth), Best Casting, Best Supporting Actor. Ben Fritz, an entertainment-business reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who was sitting next to me, also noticed the disconnect between the lovefest in the room and the voting results—maybe the “Sinners” wave had crested too late. Either way, Warner Bros. was sure to make it out on top. Winners were thanking “Mike and Pam”—Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, the heads of the studio’s film division—but their boss, David Zaslav, the outgoing C.E.O. and president of Warner Bros. Discovery, known for shelving films for tax writeoffs and collecting millions of dollars along the way, was going noticeably unmentioned.

I asked Fritz what he made of the Warner Bros. situation. “Zaslav hired two people to run his movie studio who were going to bet on auteur filmmakers, which is a great way to make your mark, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem of Warner Bros.’ fundamental financial problems,” he said. He wondered whether producing award-worthy films had been one way of making the studio a “very shiny object to acquire.” “Winning Oscars is great, and ‘Sinners’ made money, but, fundamentally, Warner Bros. has been poorly managed and laden with more and more debt for ten years,” he went on. “So, it’s nice to win the Oscars, but the economics speak loud and clear. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy—are they still going to have jobs in a year? Who knows. But, if they do, they’re going to be a subsidiary of Paramount. If Warner Bros. has to go out, this is a good way to go out.”

Before we could sink even further into cynicism, the wristbands Velcroed to the back of our seats started blinking, and it was time for the human performers behind the animated film “KPop Demon Hunters” to rock us out to “Golden.” “Sinners” bounced back toward the end of the night—it won four Oscars in all, including for Michael B. Jordan, whose Best Actor speech was the ceremony’s emotional high point. But Best Picture went to “One Battle,” which had been considered a front-runner since last fall, and Amy Madigan won Best Supporting Actress, for “Weapons,” another Warner Bros. movie.

At the Governors Ball, where the audience was celebrating over caviar, champagne, and Oscar-shaped chocolate lollipops, I sensed anxiety under the gold-plated jubilation, so I asked a few partygoers to share their anonymous thoughts on the merger-mad movie business. “I’ve been in the industry for thirty-two years. I’m not happy where it is,” a nominee in a crafts category said. “It’s all conglomerates. It’s all trying to be the biggest, and to own the most content that they can own, to make the most profit. We’re not making films anymore to rouse the public, to make the public think.” Despite just having been nominated for an Oscar, he went on, “Work’s been really scarce. I’ve never had more than two months off in thirty-two years. All of last year, I couldn’t get a job. They’re going overseas. A.I. is a big battle. It’s all crap on Amazon and Netflix and any platform that you look at.”

An agent by the chocolate-lollipop stand was more optimistic, based on the success of “One Battle,” “Sinners,” and “Weapons.” “They were all original movies. They were all risky movies when they were bought,” he said. “Here we are a year later, and these are the movies that have basically won every Oscar.” His friend, an entertainment attorney, was similarly hopeful. “I feel very bullish about the movie business right now,” he said. “Not necessarily the commercial prospects, although I think those will eventually take care of themselves. But the movies that are getting made, the movies that are in the conversation are not superhero movies, and they’re not bad sequels to movies that were original.” The attorney was one of a few people I spoke to who wished that Netflix had won the bidding war: “I think Warners would have had more of a chance to remain what it is within the umbrella of the bigger company,” he said. A programming executive told me that the streaming giant and the legacy studio could have had a “nice marriage.” “But two legacy studios merging into one—it’s really going to cannibalize the business,” he said.

An industry veteran who had worked on a Warner Bros. nominee (and a self-described “drunk-ass motherfucker”) said, of the studio, “At that level of leverage, they’re going to have to chop the shit out that place.” He sighed. “I’m doing a Warners movie right now. We just started prep, so we’re going to have ringside seats to all the chaos. I mean, for Warners to have this insane year with a historic level of nominations, historic level of box office, and then it’s, like, ‘Fuck ’em. We’re selling it.’ They had a Warners party two nights ago. Zaslav’s up there talking about how ‘Oh, my God, the studio’s back!’ I’m, like, you are pillaging this fucking thing, dude. Your top five executives are going to make a billion dollars in compensation with the sale, and they’re going to cut at least six thousand jobs. And that’s just getting started.” The real winner, he mused, was Netflix, which walked away with a nearly three-billion-dollar breakup fee for not buying Warner Bros. “And what will probably happen is they’ll probably end up selling the Warners lot to Netflix anyway, because they’ve got to get the thing off the books and make some money. Anyway. Not to be negative.” His friend nudged him. They were off to the Warner Bros. victory party. ♦

Attention: Team Acme
We’re thrilled to announce a new company-wide initiative. This week, we’ll be rolling out a robust suite of new A.I. tools, designed to future-proof our workflows and insure that we remain best in class when it comes to employing the very biggest tools in the white-collar workforce.

As part of this rollout, you can expect enhanced collaboration with a range of newly A.I.-optimized losers and douche bags. Some of these tools may feel familiar, but please note that they have undergone a meaningful transformation in the past six months, and are now fully agentic when it comes to annoying you.

Please begin working with these tools immediately. At the end of the quarter, we’ll be circling back to assess key performance indicators.

James
Works in marketing. Last year, he was a crypto tool, making frequent references to the “on-chain community.” After a brief pivot to brewing mushroom coffee in the office kitchen as part of his “cognitive stack,” he has reëmerged as the company’s Chief A.I. Growth Architect, a role that appears to consist mostly of coming up with novel ways to spam people.

Tara
Known for her capable client-facing presence, Tara has begun leveraging generative A.I. to scale her personal brand as a “female founder.” A recent LinkedIn post opens with a vulnerable story about her pet iguana’s heat-lamp preferences and concludes with the revelation that “the real moat isn’t efficiency. It’s warmth.”

Matthias
Seemed normal, until a breakup caused him to spend an entire long weekend lurking on Moltbook. Was reborn as an “A.I. Doomer.” Begins Slack messages with “In eighteen months, none of this will matter.” Has replaced his profile photo with a picture of a crumbling statue.

Preston
Now talks openly about his poetry degree from Bard instead of saying he “went to college on the East Coast.” Has started wearing scarves and spending company time writing sonnets, which—in two years, when we’re unshackled from capitalism—he knows will be Earth’s primary currency.

Bryan
Relentless self-explorer who has started feeding transcripts of his interactions with every woman in the office to his A.I. agent, and tasked it with forming a strategy for getting him laid. So far he’s had zero sex but generated substantial training data. His agent notes a particular brick wall when it comes to macking on Emily.

Emily
Previously the office social secretary, Emily has quietly declared it a feminist move to outsource all emotional labor to L.L.M.s. Her Slack messages wishing you a happy birthday and offering condolences after the death of your dog are suspiciously bullet-pointed. ♦

In Hollywood, and at the Oscars, “hope” is a very big word. Chloé Zhao used it in her recorded introduction to a clip from her film “Hamnet,” and Conan O’Brien, hosting the festivities, offered it as a reason to hold that big party in troubled times. He exhorted the crowd to enjoy the night “in the spirit of optimism.” But the most hopeful moment of this year’s ceremony came at the very end, when the final award, for Best Picture, was bestowed upon “One Battle After Another.” Its writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, a film-history fanatic who’d already just collected two awards (for Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay), offered a history lesson, citing the five nominees for Best Picture who were in the running fifty years ago, at the 1976 ceremony: “Jaws,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Nashville,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (which won). Here’s the good news: the best four of this year’s ten nominees in the category—“Sinners,” “The Secret Agent,” “Marty Supreme,” and, yes, “One Battle After Another”—are better movies than those five putative classics. (I’m sure that Anderson didn’t mean it that way, but, to quote Hamnet’s dad, “What’s done is done.”)

What makes these new films better is their wilder, freer, more original and personal approach to cinematic form, in addition to their candor about history—their directors’ manifest self-consciousness regarding their own, and their films’, place in the world, and in the art of movies itself. As Lynette Howell Taylor, the president of the Academy, said in her speech, the organization that voted on these awards comprises more than eleven thousand members, from around the world, and, at least to some extent, the results suggest greater openness and curiosity than earlier generations of Oscars might have shown. “One Battle After Another” was the night’s big winner, with awards in six categories (Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, and the first ever for Casting), ahead of “Sinners,” with four (Actor, Cinematography, Original Screenplay, and Score), and the tone of O’Brien’s opening monologue, oscillating between zingers and earnest gravity, suggests why.

“One Battle After Another,” with its opening scene involving a military-run concentration camp for rounded-up immigrants, its colossal second half centered on organized resistance to help immigrants avoid government raids, and its vision of a cabal of white (and Christian) supremacists holding secret sway in Washington, was practically torn from the headlines in advance. Its vision of indignation and resistance lurked behind every one of O’Brien’s thinly veiled jokes about Donald Trump (whose name was never mentioned) and his reference to “chaotic, frightening times,” and behind Jimmy Kimmel’s gag on the muzzled media of “North Korea and CBS,” and echoed the acceptance speech of David Borenstein, a co-director of “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” (which won Best Documentary Feature), who explained, correctly, that his film shows the authoritarian outcome of compromise, complicity, and government co-option of media. “One Battle After Another” is a movie of notable artistry, indeed one of the year’s best, but its triumph is less aesthetic than political.

The consolidation of media looms over the year’s awards in an innate way, too: both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” (directed by Ryan Coogler) were produced by Warner Bros. The movie-division heads who had the foresight to greenlight two such audacious projects, Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, were both hired by David Zaslav, soon after he became Warner’s C.E.O., when the studio merged with Discovery. Now, of course, Warner Bros. Discovery has accepted a takeover offer by David Ellison, who has already acquired Paramount—and, with it, CBS—with the result that the network’s news division has been placed in Bari Weiss’s hands, and Paramount’s slate of releases has been severely thinned out. If the deal is concluded, it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros. backing such artistically bold and politically candid movies.

“Sinners,” set in rural Mississippi in 1932, is a story of Black twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan, who won the Oscar for Best Actor) who, flush with money they stole from gangsters, open a juke joint and find themselves menaced by the Ku Klux Klan and by an altogether unexpected enemy: white folk-music vampires. The film’s meticulous detailing of life under Jim Crow and its allegorical vision of the cultural predation and erasure facing Black art and culture are no less relevant to current events than the action in “One Battle After Another,” but the kinds of stories it tells aren’t those of the headlines. This isn’t Coogler’s fault, needless to say, but that of the people who decide the headlines. (Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s nominated documentary feature “The Alabama Solution,” about Jim Crow-like oppressions prevalent in prisons today, stands in a similar relation to the Best Documentary Feature winner, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”.)

Although Anderson won for direction—and I’d contend that the scene that put it in the bag for him is the bravura chase near the end, which is dramatically arbitrary but old-school exciting in a way that few action films manage to be—the triumph of Coogler’s directing found acknowledgment in the award for Jordan’s twin performances. Directing and acting are inextricably connected; all the nominated performers are skillful and charismatic, but the distinction of their performances also conveys the tone that the directors set and the substance and range that the scripts offer. In “Sinners,” Coogler does more than tweak genre; he tweaks genre acting, though there’s exuberant energy and hectic comedy, gravity prevails throughout, and Jordan, tapping into it, turns the dual roles into ones that, for all their expansive power, are anchored by a fundamental, nearly sacramental quiet. It’s a performance that invites viewers to lean in and listen closely—exactly the opposite of what Anderson gets from Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn in “One Battle After Another.” In that movie, blusteringly goofy roles yielded performances that were monotonous and hollow. Penn won for Supporting Actor nonetheless, and it’s noteworthy that he defeated Benicio del Toro, from the same movie, whose performance—altogether finer, subtler, and more imaginative—is far less showy. This was a classic case of the award going for the most acting rather than the best acting.

A similar misconception prevailed in the award for Best Editing, and the mistake was heralded by the preamble of its presenters, the father-and-son pair Bill and Lewis Pullman, which expressed the view that good editing should be “invisible.” If the winner, “One Battle After Another,” doesn’t quite meet that classical ideal, it doesn’t brazenly reject it, either—in stark contrast to the editing in “Marty Supreme,” which is by far the most original of the year. And, although “Marty Supreme” is arguably a case of the most editing, it’s also something of a manifesto on editing itself, a work of kaleidoscopic fragmentation that seems to belong to an entirely different artistic generation than Anderson’s. The editing of “Marty Supreme” was done by Josh Safdie, the film’s director, and his co-writer, Ronald Bronstein, two independent-film luminaries who brought a shattered-glass sensibility to the finished product. (“Marty Supreme” was, startlingly, not even nominated for Original Score; I found the electronic score, by Daniel Lopatin, to be both overbearing and unforgettable, far more distinctive than most of the nominees.) The film’s outsider style remains out of bounds even when crafted inside the borders of Hollywood.

The generational gap on display in the hall—and even more evident outside of it, in living rooms—was reflected in the side business of comic sketches about the movie industry. One burlesqued the Oscar broadcast’s impending move to YouTube, in 2029. Another, about translating the show into youth lingo (ending with “six-seven”), elicited a seemingly spontaneous addendum from O’Brien, to the effect that no young person watches network television, anyway. There was a skit about a company engaged in “preserving film history . . . for the smart-phone generation” by hacking movies’ horizontal rectangles into vertical slices: thus the title of “The Godfather Part II becomes “odfat II.” And O’Brien and Sterling K. Brown did a routine impersonating Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson in “Casablanca,” to show how that film might have been, had it followed Netflix’s “second-screen” guideline, about repeating previously dispensed narrative information, on the assumption that viewers are distracted by another screen.

Clearly, Hollywood is running scared from streaming, short-form videos, and the perception of generational obsolescence. O’Brien did a riff about Amazon being shut out of this year’s Oscars, capped with the quip, “Why isn’t the website I order toilet paper from winning more Oscars?” First, history: in 1966, Paramount became part of the Gulf and Western conglomerate, which produced industrial chemicals, ran parking lots, and owned funeral homes; for much of the nineteen-eighties, Columbia Pictures (now called Sony) was owned by Coca-Cola. Nothing wrong with a laugh, but, in 2025, Amazon released one of the year’s best movies, “Hedda,” which should have been nominated in a bunch of categories, including Best Picture, Direction (Nia DaCosta), Lead Actress (Tessa Thompson), Supporting Actress (Nina Hoss), Adapted Screenplay (DaCosta’s script is based on Ibsen’s play “Hedda Gabler”), and Cinematography (Sean Bobbitt). I suspect that the film’s provenance did indeed count against it with Academy members, but the result is deeply unfortunate for the art of movies.

With these tensions and anxieties in the foreground, the ceremony was oddly divided against itself. The tone of its plentiful political humor, more wry than confrontational, suggests yet another element of fear, issuing from the heavy hand of Donald Trump on the future of studios; the Department of Justice’s antitrust division is expected to approve David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. With the movie business facing political, economic, technological, sociological, and generational pressures, this year’s ceremony had something of a funereal air. Much of the comedy went far beyond jibes into gallows humor, concluding with a parody of the ending of “One Battle After Another” in which O’Brien, offered the job of the Oscars’ Host for Life by the fascistic Christmas Adventurers, ends up murdered and cremated.

That sense of doom may be why the memorial segment, so often of a pro-forma show of melancholy, felt unusually raw, even continuous with the whole: Billy Crystal spoke of his friends Rob and Michele Reiner, Rachel McAdams eulogized Diane Keaton, and, above all, Barbra Streisand commemorated Robert Redford. She recalled working with him on “The Way We Were” and concluded by singing that movie’s title song, with a fervor that seemed to surge forth with the pent-up power of a lifetime.

Between Streisand’s gloriously nostalgic performance and Anderson’s fond reminders of the 1976 Oscars, the idea that Hollywood’s best days are in the rearview mirror emerged as the official line of the ceremony. On the other hand, for all the mournful reserve of the stage business, the movies that were most celebrated exhibited neither political timidity nor artistic caution. The real point of the Oscars is the movies, and the question isn’t whether great ones will continue to be made but whether that will still happen in Hollywood. ♦

Not enough witches have won Oscars. True, Ruth Gordon did win Best Supporting Actress for “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), in which she was a cunning satanist next door, dishing up chocolate mousse from Hell. But that’s just a drop in the cauldron. Where were the awards (or, indeed, the nominations) for Margaret Hamilton in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), Helen Mirren in “Excalibur” (1981), Anjelica Huston in “The Witches” (1990), Tilda Swinton in “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (2005), Kathryn Hunter in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), or even Angela Lansbury in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971)? The nominations Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande received for their performances in “Wicked” (2024) perhaps went some way toward redressing this grievous wrong, though they conspicuously failed to repeat that trick this year for the ill-received—and ill-conceived—sequel, “Wicked: For Good.”

Yet, happily, there was recognition for sorcery on Sunday night, when the ninety-eighth Academy Awards were handed out. To no one’s surprise, Jessie Buckley was crowned Best Actress for “Hamnet,” in which she plays an Elizabethan woman who has the primordial magic of the forest running through her veins. Among the Best Supporting Actress contenders, Wunmi Mosaku stood out, in “Sinners,” for her role as a skilled hoodoo healer who is alert to the threat of a vampire siege. Mosaku, a Nigerian-British actor of stealthy gravity, lost out to a showier, witchier performance: Amy Madigan won for the supernatural horror picture “Weapons,” in which she gives a properly Gordon-esque turn, funny and frightening in equal measure, as Aunt Gladys, a psychotic hag with an impressive bag of tricks: using a snappable twig and droplets of her own blood, Gladys invades the minds and bodies of unsuspecting suburbanites and forces them to do her sinister bidding. Oscar voters proved powerless to resist Madigan’s spell; we should have guessed the outcome from the ceremony’s opening clip reel, in which Conan O’Brien, the evening’s host, turned up in Aunt Gladys’ clown wig and makeup. What is it that Dorothy says at the end of “The Wizard of Oz”? Ah, yes: there’s no face like crone’s.

Madigan, who is seventy-five, previously received an Oscar nomination for the 1985 drama “Twice in a Lifetime,” a title that now seems prophetic. Since then, she’s figured prominently into some fairly memorable Oscar moments. When Marcia Gay Harden pulled off a startling Best Supporting Actress win for her role in Ed Harris’s film “Pollock” (2000), there was Madigan in the front row, clapping with violent elation. (Harris and Madigan have been married since 1983; the two sat together and sweetly embraced on Sunday night, when Madigan’s name was called.) And, at the 1999 ceremony, Madigan and Harris sat in silent, stone-faced protest when an honorary Oscar was awarded to the director Elia Kazan, who, in 1952, avoided the Hollywood blacklist by naming eight colleagues as former Communist Party members before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a scene that triggered flashbacks to Madigan’s performance in “Field of Dreams” (1989), as an outspoken liberal who, at a school P.T.A. meeting, righteously opposes a “Nazi cow” responsible for a book-banning campaign.

The ninety-eighth Oscars ceremony was a P.T.A. meeting of a different kind, the P.T.A. in question being the director, screenwriter, and producer Paul Thomas Anderson. His film “One Battle After Another” dominated the evening with six wins, the first of which came in the Academy’s newly inaugurated Best Achievement in Casting. Cassandra Kulukundis, the film’s casting director, gushed about her decades-long collaboration with Anderson—and then marvelled at the fact that she had somehow managed to win an Oscar before he had. “I hope you get one tonight!” she added, to much laughter from the crowd. Kulukundis needn’t have worried. Anderson won in all three of the categories for which he was nominated: Best Directing, Best Adapted Screenplay (the film is loosely based on the Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland”), and Best Picture, which he shared with his producers, Sara Murphy and the late Adam Somner. The wins ended a career-long Oscars drought that, before this year, had seen Anderson go zero for eleven across six earlier films—several of which, including “Boogie Nights” (1997), “There Will Be Blood” (2007), and “Phantom Thread” (2017), have made him the most revered American auteur of his generation.

Onstage at the end of the night, Anderson recalled that the Best Picture nominees for the film year 1975 were “Dog Day Afternoon,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Jaws,” “Nashville,” and “Barry Lyndon.” “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” Respectful disagreement aside—the best of the five is clearly “Barry Lyndon”—it was a gracious acknowledgment of the other nine Best Picture nominees, and especially of “Sinners,” a critical and commercial smash that had been nipping at the heels of “One Battle After Another” all season long, though not, perhaps, as closely as its most passionate partisans had hoped. But “Sinners,” which had already earned a record-breaking sixteen Oscar nominations, made history nonetheless: its director of photography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, became the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography—a ludicrously overdue precedent that Arkapaw acknowledged by asking every woman in the theatre to stand. “Sinners” claimed four Oscars in total, including Best Original Score, for the composer Ludwig Göransson; Best Original Screenplay, for the writer and director Ryan Coogler; and Best Actor, for Michael B. Jordan, who starred as gunslinging identical twins. The only other actor to have managed this feat was Lee Marvin, who won Best Actor for dual roles in “Cat Ballou” (1965).

Should we be annoyed, dismayed, worried, jaded, or relieved that, at the second Oscars of the second Trump Administration, barely a month into a spuriously waged war on Iran, so many of the winners’ speeches steered clear of politics? Was it incumbent upon the artists behind “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” two Oscar front-runners of genuine political heft, to speak out as forcefully against white supremacy as their films do? This reserve has become the Academy’s way: it’s not as if the “Oppenheimer” juggernaut of two years ago initiated a flood of speeches denouncing nuclear proliferation. The Oscars are clearly not the Grammys, where this year’s big winner, Bad Bunny, called out ICE in one of his speeches. Nor are the Oscars the Berlin International Film Festival, which became mired in controversy last month, as journalists flooded press conferences with questions about Palestine and Israel, Trump and ICE, and the role of politics in cinema.

Anderson, who has consciously avoided politics in the multiple speeches he’s given this season, did lower his guard a bit when he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar: “I wrote this movie for my kids,” he said, “to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them.” Anderson was not alone in invoking children and the future; the Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, accepting the award for Best International Feature Film for the drama “Sentimental Value,” paraphrased an idea from James Baldwin’s essay “The Children Are Ours”: “All adults are responsible for all children,” Trier said, “and let’s not vote for politicians who don’t take this seriously into account.”

These were stirring, unimpeachable sentiments; imagine the furor that might have erupted, by contrast, if Sean Penn, who famously disdains awards ceremonies, had shown up to collect his prize for Best Supporting Actor, for “One Battle After Another.” When he won Best Actor in 2004, for “Mystic River,” he kicked off his speech with a jab about the nonexistence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You suspect that he might have had a thing or two to say about the real-life applications of his “One Battle” character, a white-supremacist Army colonel who oversees an ICE-like crackdown on immigrants.

Even so, the night was not an entirely apolitical affair. Javier Bardem, presenting Best International Feature Film with Priyanka Chopra Jonas, started his remarks with a forceful “No to war, and free Palestine.” O’Brien threw in a jab about the failure to hold pedophiles accountable in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Predictably, the most topically urgent speeches could be found in the nonfiction-film categories. Gloria Cazares spoke movingly about her daughter, a victim of the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, as she accepted the award for Best Documentary Short with Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones, the filmmakers of “All the Empty Rooms,” which takes viewers into the bedrooms of children lost to gun violence across America. David Borenstein accepted the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which he described as a film “about how you lose your country.” Clearly not speaking only about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, he added, “You lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.”

Jimmy Kimmel, who presented both nonfiction awards, mocked “Melania,” Brett Ratner’s widely panned documentary about Melania Trump, and slammed the ascent of Bari Weiss in David Ellison’s media empire, Paramount Skydance. “As you know, there are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech,” Kimmel said. “I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.” It was a sharp dig, though I do wish that Kimmel, in invoking authoritarian regimes, had thought to mention Iran—or that someone in the writer’s room had thought to shout out the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, perhaps the greatest and certainly the bravest of this year’s nominated filmmakers. Panahi’s film “It Was Just an Accident,” a nominee for Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay, is partly drawn from his own experiences as a prisoner in the Islamic Republic. Like the superb Brazilian film “The Secret Agent,” from the director and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho, Panahi’s film is a political thriller of searing moral urgency. The fact that neither film won anything is a reminder of the Academy’s cultural myopia: for all its efforts to diversify and internationalize its voting membership, the organization seems largely oblivious to the finest, most vital work being done by filmmakers outside of America.

Ultimately, it wasn’t the brutalities of the Trump Administration or Israel’s atrocities in Gaza that drew the most sustained protest on Sunday night but rather the encroaching threat of irrelevance for a film industry facing challenges on many fronts: declining ticket sales, the rise of A.I., soul-crushing corporate mergers. In one bit after another, O’Brien celebrated the cinema of the past, with nods to “North by Northwest” (1959) and “Casablanca” (1942), in order to lampoon where Hollywood seems to be heading. Among his targets were the appalling distortion of films to fit smartphone screens and the tendency of scripts in the Netflix era to become nonstop-exposition machines. He playfully posited a worst-case scenario for 2029, when the Oscars, a longtime fixture of broadcast television, will begin streaming exclusively on YouTube. The segments were funny, even when the laughter caught in your throat. Long before an uncommonly graceful and gimmick-free In Memoriam segment, with extended individual tributes to Rob Reiner, Catherine O’Hara, Diane Keaton, and Robert Redford, there was no mistaking the faintly elegiac cloud that hung over this year’s Oscars—the sense of a ceremony, and of an entire industry, unable to stop memorializing itself. The greatness of this year’s finest films aside, it will surely take more than fresh reserves of movie magic, let alone a snap of Aunt Gladys’s twig, for a spirit of optimism to prevail again. ♦